20 days?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @10:32AM (#14548983)
It's a little disohnest to use the phrasing "Core Duo chip has 34 known issues found in the 20 days since the launch of the iMac Core Duo."

Most of these bugs were found well before the release of Core Duo. Many of the bugs are listed as having been observed by Intel only. That means the verficiation teams did hit these issues, either with very bizarre code setup, or doing something that's probably not technically legal anyway. Odds of seeing most of it in an end-user platform are very unlikely.



It's normal to not fix silicon bugs
(Score:5, Informative)
by Theovon (109752) Alter Relationship on Tuesday January 24, @10:48AM (#14549160)

As an ASIC designer, I have produced my fair share of silicon bugs. Chips are expensive to produce, making bugs expensive to fix. As a result, chip designers (even ones with deep pockets like Intel) do not look at bugs as something to FIX, but rather as something to MASK. I don't mean to hide it from people (although that does happen), but to make it not a bug by working around it.

Unless the bug is so fatal that you can't work around it, or the bug could potentially cost lives, the primary solution is to work around it. Either you write driver code to avoid the bug, or you find some other cheap solution. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of removing a feature from your marketing literature.

Intel's typical means to mask processor bugs is microcode. This hurts performance, but they can typically create a workaround that routes everything around the bug. I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but I'm sure that by saying they won't fix some bugs, they're saying that they won't respin the silicon but rather mask the bug in some other way.

Listing the bugs (and not fixing them in this version) is an appropriate thing for Intel to do.

(I'm no Intel fanboy. I think they're bastards. But this is NOT an example of them being bastards.)